Symptoms
by Tris'sLightningQuill
Summary: ...taking foolish chances or acting giddy. A spell of dizziness, when you tripped and stumbled whenever you tried to move, when you could not say a sentence without your tongue mangling half the words...There are others. Do you remember?
1. first

Nynaeve managed to keep her calm, until the girl began screaming for her mother.

There was nothing _for_ breakbone, but to let it run its course. You countered the height of the fever as best you could, and in some cases—although this was not one of them—you could dose for the pain, but ultimately there was little you could do to combat it. It either killed or it didn't. Usually, Mistress Barran pointed out, it killed early—a small mercy, as it were—and this was well into the third day. _Usually_, Nynaeve repeated to herself, snatching her thumbnail away from her mouth in chagrin. _Maybes seldom are_. The mean thought whispered through her head, and she stamped down on it. Her being jumpy would not help Egwene any.

A day or two, Mistress Barran had told her before ducking out into the late autumn wind to deal with a [Coplin's] busted fist. But somehow as she said it, she'd neglected to meet her apprentice's eye. She knew how much Nynaeve hated to lose anyone, and though Nynaeve loved the kindhearted Wisdom dearly, she resented the evasion—if not quite lie—even meant kindly, to keep her head clear of the panic that had crippled her once before.

It was very much a routine vigil. Mistress Barran often set her to watching patients deemed relatively stable...one way or the other. She'd told Nynaeve she was confident she could handle anything that came up in her absence. Besides, with breakbone, there really wasn't much else to _do_, save watch. But that was terrible enough by itself.

Egwene al'Vere was a small girl at nine years old, made smaller by contrast with the Wisdom's full-sized bed. She was an active girl, into everything, always bossing the boys in a way that made her mother smile and say she was destined for the Women's Circle. Nynaeve had watched her grow up, had often minded her when her mother was buy. Mistress al'Vere was a kind woman, a trait shared by her daughter: she'd let Nynaeve sleep a week or two under the Winespring's roof when her parents died, and she hadn't known whether she would be shifted off to nonexistent relatives in Deven Ride or taken on as a charity on someone's over-crowded farm. Mistress al'Vere had always been kind to her. Nynaeve did not want to be the one to tell her that her child had succumbed to the fever. The girl's whimpering filled up the small room: she'd hardly stopped crying, save when she fell exhausted into a restive sleep. Nynaeve had been sitting up with her.

For lack of any other way to disburse the nervous energy building within her, she took to pacing the length of the small room. One hand she kept wrapped absently around the end of her new braid, as if to remind herself it was there. To remind herself what it stood for. At hardly sixteen, she had been deemed mature enough to braid her hair up like a woman, when many girls were made to wait until they were seven- or eight- or even nineteen. Sixteen and a woman, she should be strong enough to see to what needed doing, and not flinch at the unpleasantness of it. Apprenticed to Mistress these last three years, she still had trouble adopting a healer's cool-headed dispassion, as was often essential. Mistress Barran asserted that a tender heart was no bad thing, but Nynaeve was well enough aware that it sometimes got in the way. The inability to detach the sufferer from the suffering itself could be a liability, causing bungling, hesitation at a vital moment, clouding the cool thinking and rapid judgment that was often needed, was often the difference between life and death. Nynaeve knew just how possible it was to care too much.

A moan from the bed became a shout as the girl woke herself up, again. Nynaeve was instantly at the bedside, hands fluttering uselessly, adjusting compresses that did not yet need changing, tucking the coverlet in more closely though the child's tossing tore it loose again just as quickly. In between the tears, now, Egwene was calling out for her mother. Nynaeve bit down hard on her lip, and brushed at the damp hair on the girl's brow, though she flinched away from the touch, uttering soothing noises. Though it was not regular practice to house sick persons in the Wisdom's own cottage, it was sometimes done, necessary in this instance to keep illness out of the Winespring Inn, but also because Mitrss al'Vere had failed to contract the childrens' disease before reaching adulthood and Mistress Barran had cautioned strongly against risking it now. Nynaeve, who'd pulled through breakbone fever as a toddler, had been set over the child.

It was not uncommon for a child to cry for a parent, or a sibling, in the throes of illness. Near the end, folk often called to loved ones that weren't present...Again, Nynaeve squashed the thought, but it lingered uncomfortably. Egwene's piteous cries grated at her, gnawed at the pit of her stomach with sympathetic pangs. Even three years after, she _still_ woke sweating from the odd nightmare with that self-same word on her tongue. She too knew how deeply a mother's tender care could be missed, once removed. And didn't the girl deserve that, at least? Nynaeve was merely a substitute, and a markedly poor one at that.

Nynaeve found that she was angry, furious, even; so much so that her entire skin tingled. It was just _not fair_. Egwene was a bright child, more settled than Nynaeve herself had been but still a bundle of energy that embodied the Light. Hot needles pricked the rims of her eyes, burned as the tears blurred her vision. Both hands now gripped her braid white-knuckled and she tugged steadily, scalp protesting, as righteous anger at the injustice of life roared through her. The child lay there soaked in sweat, groaning and twisting until Nynaeve could not understand why she didn't hear her bones snapping. She had watched Egwene go from swaddling clothes to short skirts, and now, she would have to stand here and watch her die. And she could do nothing. She couldn't save Egwene, any more than she'd been able to save her mother, or her father.

Nynaeve dropped to her knees at the bedside, seizing the child's small hand even though she recoiled from the painful touch, because she _had_ to do _something_, or, failing that, explode. _Please_, she thought incoherently. _Please_. She gripped the little hand firmly, gently, carefully, wishing crazily that she could will the girl health and strength that way. Her own fingers were a stiff cage, every muscle in her body clenched rigidly as the useless, helpless tears continued to slip down her cheeks. She hardly noticed when Egwene quieted; her screams spent themselves, then the crying, until an interminable time later even her whimpering petered off into hiccup-punctured breaths. Nynaeve was more than half afraid to make certain whether she'd finally slipped away or not. So she continued to kneel there clutching her hand, numb and stiff, brow resting against the edge of the mattress. She wasn't even aware when her own eyes drifted shut.

She roused as someone disentangled her fingers: Mistess Barran, bent over the bed above her, fussing with the quilt, checking the patient. Nynaeve scrambled up, backing away in quick paces til her heels bumped the far wall. She couldn't bring herself to look.

"Is she...?" it was less demand than it was plea.

Mistress Barran turned briefly at the note of panic in her voice, brows raised. "Sleeping," she assured her.

"Sleeping?" Nynaeve repeated stupidly, scrubbing her sweaty palms on her apron.

"Aye," the Wisdom affirmed. "Fever's broken at last." When Nynaeve only stared, she gestured, "Come and see for yourself."

So Nynaeve did, sidestepping the odd look Mistress Barran touched on her as she moved up to the bed. And indeed, the unhealthy flush was gone from the child's face, her eyes flicking beneath their lids only with the quiet dreams of an easy sleep. Nynaeve stood there a moment, reassuring herself, as she became aware of the discrepancies. 'At last,' Mistress Barran had said, when not two hours ago she hadn't expected that the fever would break fro a day or two yet. It was harder still to reconcile the screaming child whose hand she'd held as—she thought—she was dying: sleeping peacefully now, Egwene hardly looked as if she'd ever _been_ ill.

"She'll pull through now, do you think?" Mistress Barran asked the leading question as she often did, expecting her apprentice to provide the answer a Wisdom should give, assess her judgment. But her voice sounded strange. Nynaeve spun, and then nodded jerkily, unable to speak.

"What are you looking for?" she ventured at last: Mistress Barran was stil rumaging through the modest apothocary arranged on the sideboard as if looking for something that wasn't there...counting. She was counting.

The Wisdom shrugged, tapping a knuckle against her puzzled frown. "Perhaps, in combination, another antipyretic proved more effective than we've thought before?" she conjectured. Oddly, she was looking directly at Nynaeve, who began to squirm under the unwonted scrutiny. "Or... …..Anise, perhaps?" the rapid question fired directly off at her out of seeming nowhere caused her to jump. Out of reflex, she shook her head. "Or yarrow and valerian together?"

"No." Nynaeve stammered, cozening on. "No, I...I didn't...I haven't done anything..."

"There now!" Mistress Barran looked up from her counting again, crossed to the bedside. "Never you fear. The child's _fine_, as you see." She cupped an arm around Nynaeve's shoulders, sweeping an arm over the sleeping form.

Nynaeve broke away, alarmed. "I didn't _do_ anything!" There was a plaintive note in the denial that seemed disproportionate to the accusation—if accusation it was—even in her own ears.

The Wisdom opened her mouth, but changed what she'd been about to say with a shake of the head and briskly shooed Nynaeve towards the door. "Get on with you, child, and take a walk. You've been cooped in here long enough to rattle anybody."

Thoroughly bemused, Nynaeve complied.


	2. reaction

"Fetch me that pincushion, would you?" Mistress Barran's voice seemed to come down at her from a long ways off.

Carefully, Nynaeve set aside the half-knitted stocking she'd been working at and stood, pushing herself up off the chair. She'd thought to move away from the hearth anyhow: its heat was too great. In the next moment, though, it seemed not to touch her at all and she was shivering in the sparse room's pale wash of morning light. Unable to decide whether to move closer or farther away, she'd stayed put, til her mentor's instruction gave her incentive to stir herself from the half-daze she hadn't meant to fall into.

She'd made it a step and a half across the parlor floor when the braided rug rose up and smacked her rudely across the face. The hollow thunk of her skull hitting the carpeted wood resounded oddly in her ears, echoing long after it had any right to. The white light from the casement shafted down across her face, slurring her vision and, it seemed, her hearing—someone called her name as if through water, or the densest fog. Nynaeve did not even try to make an answer to it. She was hyperaware of the wood grain under her fingertips, the raised bands of carpet pressing ridges into her cheek: conversely, she could no longer feel the uncomfortable husk of her body. She did not know when hands seized her shoulders; her world of blinding white had already given way to hazy grey, and then a numbing black.

Nynaeve woke to a sensation of being smothered. A heavy weight rested uniformly atop her; even the golden light of late afternoon seemed to press against her eyelids even before she opened them. Irritably, she brought up her hands and batted back the mound of down comforters clustered under her chin, and peeled away the hair that had become sweat-slicked to her face: someone had undone her braid. It was only then that she became fully aware of her surroundings. Through the square of window directly opposite she could see through the naked stalks of beanpoles that the snow had finally let up. But the high bed in which she was ensconced was certainly not her own narrow cot [in the loft.] The herb-strewn sideboard with its few trinkets and the small fire crackling in the grate put her in the Wisdom's own room. Disoriented and a little startled by the unwarranted change of scenery, Nynaeve struggled to kick her way free of the heavy quilts. Even as she brushed past the heavy oak door, the plucked in consternation at the skirt of her flannel nightdress, wondering what had become of the woolen kirtle she'd put on that morning.

"Light, girl, what are you doing out of bed?" Nynaeve jumped as the half-shouted accusation hit her from across the room. At once, the Wisdom's broad frame was filling up her line of sight, grabbing her face—with undue roughness, it seemed to her—[pressing] her cheeks between her palms, lark-brown eyes intently searching her charge's [face.] Alarmed, Nynaeve tried to jerk away out of reflex; Mistress Barran firmly pulled her back, rewarding her with a milk-water slap of reprimand as she freed one hand press the back of it to her brow. So Nynaeve stood anchored like a puppet between the strong hands cupping her head, staring up at the tall woman. Mistress Barran's expression continued to pucker and twist. Confused and growing nearly anxious by this time, Nynaeve had made up her mind to [overstep her bounds] and demand just what the matter was when the Wisdom released her abruptly and stepped away, tsking.

"Well, I never..." she muttered, shaking her head as she gave whatever it was that had been puzzling her over to lie. She was much better at recognizing when she was outmatched than Nynaeve herself. "There are stranger things in this world, I suppose."

Nynaeve thought to herself how odd the Wisdom was behaving.

"So." Mistress Barran injunctioned briskly. "If you're up, you may as well make yourself useful." and she indicated the mending basket Nynaeve had abandoned earlier. "How _are_ you feeling?" The demand—there was no two ways about it, it _was_ a demand—was shot back over her shoulder as if she hoped it would go over off-hand, but the tone was indignant, as if she could scarce believe her own hands, or if she half-suspected Nynaeve might lie about it, to be as stubborn as a fool man trying to put on an unnecessarily brave face.

Nynaeve considered. "Hungry," she admitted at last, shoulders tucking in a little sheepishly. She'd frightened the Wisdom somehow—just _how_, she wasn't too sure of. She hadn't _meant_ to.

Mistress Barran laughed: she was forgiven. "Well then, sit down. I'll take the barley and beans off the fire."

As she ate, Nynaeve did her best to ignore the intermittent prickle of eyes on her back.


	3. insulted

Her satchel bumped rhythmically against her thigh. Each footfall rang without raising a puff of dust from the hard-packed path ash she made her way back from the forest's edge, basket of greens balanced on her hip. It was early yet, but she didn't mind the before-dawn walk to gather shy celandine and wild coltsfoot. Mistress Barran _swore_ it grew better outside gardens, and so Nynaeve was sent trudging to the edge of the Waterwood to reap the elusive necessaries. She didn't mind: it was quiet, this time of day, and so far from the fields. The sounds of small life, the smell of night-cooled air, the color of the light, all were comfortable and familiar. She remembered many such mornings with her Da.

There was a whooping from hard by, and the craned her neck to catch the ragtag passel of boys cutting through the wood, and shook her head in disapproval. Boys. [They should be in the fields, or helping their mothers in the house, or...something.]

Their trajectories converged, and one boy far ahead of the pack whipped close to tweak the tip of her long braid as he passed and nearly upsetting her basket into the bargain. Nynaeve just barely kept from stamping her foot. They should _know better_. At that age, Abel Cauthon's little boy certainly should. She contented herself with shouting at his retreating back, "Aye, boy, you'd better run! And hope your Da won't hear what you're getting up to when you should be minding his horses!" Stripped to the waist like most of the other boys, he was likely headed for the swimming hole. Typically, little Mat only laughed as he kept right on pounding through the undergrowth.

The rest of the boys overtook her like the herd of stallions they thought themselves; a few even lacked the breeches Mat had worn. Nynaeve planted her feet and tucked her burden to her middle, flatly refusing to give ground. It was shameful—all these lads had tasks back home needed doing.

As the rear guard moved on. Nynaeve was brought up short w/ and indignant exclamation by an errant hand giving her backside an oh-so nonchalant slap in passing. Looking back over his shoulder, [Wit Coplin]—bare as the day he was born—had the sheer gall to _wink_ at her.

Nynaeve stood frozen in the track, immobilized by icy fury. One hand jerked savagely at her braid, enough that her eyes watered: the other hung onto the basket white-kuckled. [Wit Coplin] was only a year younger than she. He should _know better_. Fury bubbled in her veins like burnt gravy. No one—_no one—_could bring themselves to accord her the respect a Wisdom's apprentice was due. No one seemed even to _notice_ her braided hair, though she was _only_ sixteen.

She glared daggers at [Wit Coplin's] tanned back, simmering, boiling. She wondered why his skin didn't peel away before her eyes. Livid anger blurred her vision—made her light-headed. She had no breath or she would have screamed.

...And up ahead, [Wit Coplin] tripped over nothing, as if knocked with invisible branches. He skidded, tried to right himself and was flung into the dark mud in the rut. As he rose up coated in the stuff like a boggart. His companions laughed and threw good-natured insults. The one who offered a hand got repaid with a yank that landed him in the mud, too.

Pointedly ignoring the display, Nynaeve pressed on, feeling inordinately smug.


	4. repercussion

"Sit down, girl, before you fall." Mistress Baran's voice was heavy with disdain as she pushed Nyneave none too gently into a chair.

Nyneave herself was close to tears. "N-n—I-I-I—" she stammered and choked on the words that refused to come out properly. She tried to lever herself up off the armrests, but Mistress Baran's broad hand pressed her firmly down again, and her limbs felt waterlogged, as if this were a dream. _Light, let this be a dream._

She was shoved roughly back into her seat, and when Mistress Baran took her hands away she knew better than to struggle. She plucked restlessly at the hems of her sleeves, working her mouth, but it was no use. The words just wouldn't obey.

Mistress Baran snorted in disgust. "Aye, you'll stay here and sleep it off, else _you'll_ be the one to explain to Bran Al'vere why his stores came up short."

Nyneave yanked savagely at her hair. "I _didn't_!" That came out a high pitched whine, but at least it was intelligible. "I di—I-I'm n-no-ot, I, no—d-dr-drunk!" She was sobbing now, silently, dryly, though her eyes had gone all over blurry. Nyneave wasn't sure what scared her more, that she was tear-blinded, or the possibility that it wasn't tears at all.

"Well an' all, girl, don't cry over it." Mistress Baran was suddenly maternal and contrite. "You're young. Best you get these follies out now, 'fore they catch up with you and make you into a sot. Won't have a Wisdom who's wine-soaked when she's needed." She chucked Nyneave's chin, eyes winking at the girl's slacked expression. "Sure an' I've done things at your age as would make even your horse-mane curl up."

Nyneave was not comforted. She would never get the Wisdom to understand her, even if her words deigned to come out of a piece and in the proper order. And what was she supposed to think? What with her daring Wil Al'seen to walk his ridgepole and then beating him to it, coming home to the Wisdom's cottage and walking smack into the doorframe...Stumbling around like a toddler too long around the maypole and stuttering and slurring like the worst drunk in Tarren Ferry. Nyneave ground her teeth, drumming her heels against the chair in sheer childish frustration.

The room still spun and rocked madly before her eyes, for all she was sitting still. Oddly enough, she didn't feel at all sick. Nyneave licked her lips and grasped at the shard of thought that perhaps she'd somehow managed to get _so_ drunk that she did not recall the drinking. Perhaps she was just going crazy. Perversely, the thought made her giggle.


	5. foretelling

Hanging up the bed linens, clothespin in her mouth, at first Nynaeve thought she'd misheard the Wisdom's remark.

"I said, lovely day, isn't it?" Mistress Barran reiterated.

Nynaeve blinked in consternation at the cloudless blue sky, the balmy air. She hadn't really noticed them before, and was a little startled to now. The vividly blue expanse clashed a little in her eyes, out of sync with the image in her mind: perhaps it was just her stormy mood that projected a sense of grey onto the sky. She snapped out the sheet roughly, as if _it_ were somehow at fault, and hung it on the line.

"All ready, some of the farm-folk talk of planting," Mistress Barran prattled on. Nynaeve listened with half an ear. "All the signs look towards an early summer." More than midway through the spring, Nynaeve had to agree with that. But also, it was clear that winter had yet to have its final say in the Two Rivers.

"Why, if this weather holds, we may even—"

"It won't." Nynaeve put in absently, transferring the last pins from her mouth and securing them on the taut clothesline.

"Oh-ho?" the Wisdom appraised her from behind a tablecloth with skeptically arched brows.

"Well, it won't." she insisted, really looking up from her task for the first time. "It'll break by nightfall."

"So sure of yourself, are you?" Mistress Barran challenged.

Nynaeve did not notice the fun being poked at her. She did not dignify that with even a nod. It was so obvious. The Wisdom half-began another rebuttal, but let it go with a gusty breath and leaned back from the fence, turning in a slow circle to study the uncharacteristically clear horizon from all quarters. At last, she only shrugged and left it at that.

The freak storm that set in abruptly with the fading light took nearly everyone by surprise. Shingles were torn from the roof of the Winespring Inn, and more than a few thatches needed repair. In the morning, a handful of sheep were discovered missing, and the chickens were never found. [ ]'s old cow was found interred in the swollen bog edging the Waterwood. Those few who had made free with the good weather and begun the plowing early—none had been foolhardy enough to lay seed yet without consulting the Wisdom, thank the Light—woke to find their furrows ruined, a good part of the soil washed away, and their work undone.

The driving, freezing rain gave way to thick, wet snow by mid-morning. Cloistered by the bad weather, Nynaeve felt doubly oppressed by the walls of the little cottage: there was nowhere to escape the Wisdom's eye. And as reports continued to trickle in from outlying farmsteads, it seemed that the Wisdom's eye pressed more and more heavily down upon her, her scrutiny not unlike a scrubbing so thorough Nynaeve wondered why her skin was not a raw and shining pink by now. It was as they sat down to the midday that Mistress Barran broached the topic was clearly weighing on her mind. "Nynaeve, child, what do you know, _really_, about Listening to the Wind?"


	6. culmination

"Here." Grim-faced, Mistress Barran thrust her burden at her apprentice. "Wrap the body. She'll bleed out if I don't stop it now."

Nynaeve hardly registered the bread loaf sized parcel of limbs and head an torso that fit awkwardly in her two hands. "He's not breathing!" she shrilled.

The Wisdom spent a precious two seconds on a level look that passed over her shoulder and speared the girl where she stood. "Wrap the body. I must do what I can for his mother now."

Numbly, Nynaeve knelt, beginning the motions. It did not seem _right_, somehow, she railed inwardly as she laid the small form out on the viscous-stained scrap of flannel: swaddling cloth turned winding sheet.

His color was all wrong: under the mottled white of vernix, the flesh tones were surmounted by the soft blue-green of something frozen, something drowned. But he wasn't cold, yet, he hadn't had time to grow cold. Impulsively, she chafed the tiny limbs, wondering why she was fool enough to even half hope her clumsy ministrations would make a difference when the Wisdom had all ready given up. His color was wrong. There was no clear reason to it, she thought. He wasn't frozen; he just wasn't breathing. The notion hit her like a physical blow. No one, ever, should drown in thin air.

He was so tiny, with an irregular shock of dark hair, and fingers and toes like twigs. He'd come early, with the rising of the storm. Just _how_ early was impossible to say—at least a month, though likely it was more. His mother was young, and it was her first. Often, when a babe came early they did not live, unready to face the world so soon; most often it was the lungs, underdeveloped, that gave out. _But_, Nynaeve thought with consternation, his were _fine_. He was perfect: only small. With her hand resting on his naked chest, she _knew_ the lungs within were well-formed, and would grow strong given half a chance. He had simply not been given the chance!

Before she could think about what she was doing—stoutly _refusing_ to think about it, lest that cause her to stop—Nynaeve bent low over the prone form of the newborn. Gathering the slight weight gently in the crook of one arm, she cradled his head so that it fell at a slope into her hand, tilting the pathways to his lungs open. Suctioning off mouth and nose, she peremptorily sucked his airways clear and spat. Mistress Barran would have of course performed this precaution all ready, but it was the first step, and no harm could come of being certain. Through his back and beneath her hand she could make out the intermittent flutter of a heartbeat. Good: that was good. Covering mouth and nose once more, she began to blow soft puffs of air from her own cheeks down into his lungs, counting the while to keep herself steady. Faster and shallower than she would breathe for herself, but it was an easy rhythm to fall into: it was what he needed. Careful of the pressure of her stronger air into his fragile lungs. Arms taut and stable as she kept him at the precise angle. Each aided breath a silent injunction: _Breathe. Breathe. Breathe._ She was consumed by a sense of urgency, panic, and yet was utterly calm, still. She floated in a sea of dark, aware only of the baby boy painted on the backs of her eyes by the contact of her arms and hands, mouth and chest; mapped by the air from her lungs that passed into his and resonated there. Nynaeve kept her eyes closed, _feeling_ his responses and intuiting her own moves; seeing was unnecessary. She thought of his color rightening, growing warm. She thought of his heart picking up strength and speed: under her fingers, she was unaware that this was exactly what it did, ever so slightly. The entirety of Creation contracted to her endless pocket of dark, the steady counted rhythm. Fast and shallow, but exactly _right_. She did not care that her back was stiff from remaining crouched over; she did not care that beneath her, her legs had grown numb. She did not even know it. Her entire body ached to be trembling, yet could not. She must remain solid and unmoving. All that existed was she and his boy. If he was to be given a chance, she must be the strength and continuity of the Light itself.

"_Breathe_, burn you," she hissed, the acid burn of hot tears seeping between her lashes.

Beginning the cycle anew—for only the second or third time, she realized—she blew softly. And with that breath there came a jolt that lanced through all of her, beginning nowhere and everywhere at once. It seemed to ride out on that breath, flowing down into the child's lungs where it illuminated every infinitesimal filament, spread out to fill his blood, trace every branching artery and vein with searing light. In that breath, she _knew_ him..._was_ him.

Nynaeve reeled back as though struck, sucking in a breath of her own: of a sudden she found herself very lightheaded and glad to be sitting. Beneath the fingers resting lightly on the babe's ribcage, there was a galloping kick, as from within a womb. Too startled to be ecstatic, she found _his_ breath pushing back at her, and hastily pulled away. A faltering inhale, a shuddering exhale. Once more, stronger this time, and a thin, piteous cry broke the too still air. Nynaeve thought it the most beautiful sound she'd ever heard, or ever would hear.

Tugging low the lacing of her blouse, she pressed his tiny body to her chest, pulling the wrapping more snugly around the back of him, knowing just how important the contact of skin on skin was for him just now, even more than the warmth. She struggled to keep her breathing even, willed her unruly heart to slow and steady itself. That was vitally important, she knew, as the baby lay against her and from listening and feeling reaffirmed just what a heartbeat was supposed to be. So even though she felt herself just a hair shy of frenzy, she forced herself—she was never quite sure how—to stillness. She rocked gently back and forth as the child continued to mewl and wail against her shoulder; she was satisfied to note how those cries seemed to gain body with each redoubled effort. She hummed softly, an old song without words, the notes drawn-out and low. They made a harmony of it, almost, though she did not know if the pitch of his cries gravitated towards her melody, or whether it was the other way around entirely.

An Age, an eternity passed that way; a few minutes, an hour, a lifetime or two. "Give _over_, Nynaeve." she dimly registered someone berating her. She had not realized anyone else was there, or that someone had been trying to get the infant from her until strong capable hands inserted themselves between them. "Let him nurse, now." Even then she was loath to let him go, but that would be all right, wouldn't it? She trusted the owner of the voice—whose face she hadn't yet mustered the strength to look up and see—to know what she was about, and relinquished the small bundle of warmth that had seemed to grow as much a part of her as her own hand.

Free to at last, she slumped against the wall, feeling utterly drained. She became aware of the other figures moving about, backlit by the fire, but she saw them as if from below the surface of a lake: their shapes blurred and words muted, and she an unfathomable way off, unreachable. She felt herself shaking uncontrollably, and yet knew she was still. Her mouth tasted as if she'd been running. For an interminable time, Nynaeve just sat listening to her own ragged breathing, curled in around herself, feeling hollow in ways she could not comprehend.

"Come on." Later—how _much_ later she wouldn't even try to guess; time had been doing funny things to her today—someone grabbed her under the shoulders and hauled her upright. It took her a few seconds to remember how to get her feet to stay under her. "Best we be getting on, now."

Nynaeve allowed herself to be led out, craning over her shoulder for a last look at mother and child, both asleep now in the freshly made bed. She did not have the words to thank the Wisdom just then for leaving her there on the floor. She wasn't sure how the after-thought tasks of clearing up, stoking the fire, preparing a meal, had gotten done since it was her task, as apprentice, to affect them. But Mistress Barran was the sort of woman who knew too much without your having to say much of anything, and so Nynaeve simply leaned against the welcome support of the Wisdom's side as they trudged home through the new mud.

Squeezing her briefly in what approximated a one-armed huged, Mistress Barran told her softly, "You did good in there today, girl."

Nynaeve smiled blearily to herself. She _had_, hadn't she?


End file.
